The Serpent’s Mate by Susan Trombley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When Cass is abducted by aliens and sold to an alien pirate queen who collects female slaves to harvest their pheromones, her first experience with extra-terrestrials quickly turns from surreal into a nightmare, which only grows more terrifying when an alien with a snake-like lower body and a surprisingly handsome face comes to her rescue. But Cass isn’t sure she’s actually safe with him, because he looks at her with hunger in his eyes.
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Nahash has always been a loyal, honourable Iriduan soldier. After distinguishing himself above his peers, the genetically-enhanced warrior volunteered for an experimental program to create a hybrid with powerful psionic abilities, using DNA taken from a giant serpent that decimated one of their outer colonies. Though his body changed into a form beyond the scientists’ expectations, his mind became a weapon that could alter the very course of Iriduan civilization, perhaps even saving it from its inevitable ruin.
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After such drastic alterations to his biology, scientists told him he was free from the affliction that caused Iriduan males to imprint on a single female, bonding him to her for life. The last thing he expects is to bond instantly to a human female he rescues during a raid on a pirate colony. Now, he’s stuck with her, because if he isn’t exposed to his mate’s scent on a regular basis, he will die. The fact that his body craves her as much as it needs her fills him with resentment, but when he realizes that the Iriduan Empire will do anything to keep her under their control because of what she means to him, he doesn’t hesitate to protect his mate – even if it means betraying his people.
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The rogue test subject and the abducted human make a desperate escape from the Iriduan Empire, but the galaxy proves to be a dangerous place and there are worse things than the Iriduans waiting in the darkness of space. With no one to rely on except for each other, Nahash and Cass might not live long enough to find a home where they can settle down and explore the love that grows between them – love that takes them beyond their physical bond.
The Serpents Mate
Strange Universe!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚💙❤️🧡
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📘📗📕📙
World building: 🌏🌏🌍🌎🌏
Character development: 🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂
The Setting: Space
The Hero(s): Nahash – an Iriduan male who served his planet in the military, he then volunteered to be a test subject. The Iriduan people go through a metamorphosis between the teen and adult years much like a caterpillar into a butterfly. The geneticists told him that he was signing up for some experiment that would make him go through a second metamorphosis to make him an enhanced soldier. However, the snake DNA they spliced with his took over much more than expected.
The heroine: Cass – she was abducted from Earth and sold to a woman who collected female pheromones in order to catch unsuspecting males with. Once an Iriduan male smelled the scent of his mate, he needed it to survive, so it not only made the males addicted to the scent similarly to a drug, but once mated the males are under the control of the female.
The Love Story: Nahash is the best weapon his society has. On a mission to take out a pirate base, he catches wind of Cass’s scent. She is his mate and he can’t ignore it so he saves her. However, he soon realizes that his superiors will use her to control him. Also, since she is now so valuable, they will also have a bunch of men in the military smell her pheromones and become her harem because multiple men can be mated to one female.
Nahash not only wants Cass for himself, but knows that if given a choice between the more human looking Iriduans in the military and himself with his snakelike appearance, he stands no choice, so he escapes with Cass.
I like the story, it is a good one, though I got a bit disturbed by how non-humanoid he was. Though he is intelligent and has an upper body which is more human-like it is still covered in scales. His genitalia is like that of a snake (2 peens). What freaked me out the most was how Nahash was thinking of how his eating habits differ from hers.
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“His teeth and jaw were not designed for chewing, and since the metamorphosis, he’d learned to swallow his food whole. Now accustomed to eating a much larger portion than the ration meals provided, he’d learned to prefer live prey that he squeezed to death before swallowing, expanding his jaw to fit his mouth around it.”
It is one thing for aliens in books to be humanoid versions of a different species, but another to be barely human versions of an animal like a snake. I suppose it shouldn’t matter if they are intelligent life forms, but I guess I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
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